Creating the time to make it happen
As a small business owner, or working as part of a small team, finding the time to move your business forward can be difficult. I get that entirely, I’ve been there. But you have two options: you either find that time or you stay exactly where you are now. Think of all the successful people in the world right now. Do you know how they became successful? It’s because they have 30 hours in every day instead of the 24 that you have. They have 6 hours more than you every day and that’s the time they use to be successful. You don’t believe me? Good. Because it’s a lie. They have the exact same 24 hours a day that you, and everyone else on this planet, has. If you ever get to know someone who has become wildly successful, you will soon find out that it’s not down to luck or privilege – it’s down to how they spend those same 24 hours that you’ve got. Go and read Richard Branson’s stories about setting up his first businesses. Or read Seth Tibbot’s story of how he founded Tofurky whilst living in a treehouse to save money. They created the time to do the good things that would move their business forward, and you are going to do the same.
I didn’t have the time to write this course. I wrote it at a time when I was starting a new business whilst also trying to keep on top of paid customer work, give time to my family, and deal with all sorts of other pressures on my time. I was already working long hours, there was no time to also fit in writing a 90,000-word course on marketing a vegan business. But it was a HUGE part of our strategy, something that we knew would really move us forward. So, I ‘created’ the time. I set my alarm for 4.30am every day for a month, and the vast majority of this course was written in the twilight hours between 5.00am and 8.30am before the rest of the world got going. As I’m writing this now, I can see the countryside outside my window set out in a golden glow as the sun rises. I created a (beautiful) 3 and a half uninterrupted hours at the start of every day to work on something really valuable. As soon as 8.30am comes around, the emails start dropping in, the phone starts ringing, heads start popping around my office door, the family starts WhatsApping and I’m back into my standard day.
My morning view writing this course
And you can do the same. If you are at your desk for 5.00am, then by the time the usual start time of 9.00am rolls around you have already done half a day’s work. Do that for just a week and you have created an extra two and a half days. That’s two and a half days that your competitors don’t have. That’s 20 hours to finally do the thing that is stopping your business from moving forward. Do it for a single month and that’s an extra 80 hours you have created. You still think that you don’t have the time to move your business forward? I am a big advocate for having a good work-life balance, but what you are actually doing is shifting the time from something unproductive to something that will make a real difference. Getting up earlier means going to bed earlier, but what do you actually do of real value after 10.00pm anyway? Does it mean giving up Netflix for a week? And if you think that you can’t get up that early, well if you were going away on holiday tomorrow and had to set an alarm for 4.30am to catch your plane, then you’d have no trouble convincing yourself to go to bed early!
You can find other ways to be more efficient about how you use your time to make your dream a reality. Find other ways to give yourself permission to spend time working on making your business successful. Give yourself permission to block a day out in your diary to work on your company’s pitch for example. Even book a holiday to do it – yes, book a week off work. Tell all your customers that you are going away, put on the email autoresponder and then spend that week working on something that will set you up for years to come. Are you thinking that this is all too much? Well, no-one if forcing you to do it. To repeat, you have two options: make the time to do the things you need to do to make your business successful, or don’t and instead just stay exactly where you are now.
Celebrate and use ‘wins’ to propel you forward. Have you just heard a wonderful story of how your product has changed someone’s life, or have you made a new sale off the back of some new marketing activity you have just done? Cherish these. It’s why we’re in business. Take the energy from that win and use it to propel you to the next.
